June 09, 2009 08:47 PM UTC

Gore Vs. Jong-IL? Gore to go to N.Korea

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• by: wade norris

(apologies for brevity of report – written during lunch break)

For those of us disappointed in the way Gore has been treated by the past president – this is some great news and a great use of former President Gore.

from Huffpo:

Gore To North Korea? Obama May Send Ex-VP To Negotiate Journalists’ Release

President Obama is considering sending former Vice President Al Gore to North Korea to negotiate the release of two American journalists from Current TV, Reuters reports.

Aides to Obama have been working behind the scenes to secure the release of the two women, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were sentenced on Monday to twelve years of hard labor.

The network they both work for was co-founded by Gore. Victor D. Cha, who holds the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the former vice president would be the best person to attempt to secure their release.

North Koreans are “very sensitive about their public face,” Cha told the San Francisco Chronicle, and having Gore there would help ease their concerns.

More details from AFP

“It’s a very, very sensitive issue, I’m not going to go into it,” Kelly told reporters who pressed him on the matter.

“This is such a sensitive issue, I’m just not going to go into those kinds of discussions that we may or may not have had,” he added when asked whether Gore himself had raised the matter with the State Department.

“The bottom line is that these two young women should be released but I’m not going to go into any kind of details on what we will or won’t do,” Kelly said when asked again if it would help to send Gore.

The two women, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, went on trial in North Korea Thursday on charges that could send them to a labor camp for years and further raise tensions with Washington following last week’s nuclear test.

The TV reporters were detained by North Korean border guards on March 17 while researching a story about refugees fleeing the hardline communist state.

In a column published May 9 in the Washington Post, Victor Cha, a former adviser to president George W. Bush on North Korea, suggested that President Barack Obama’s administration should send Gore to Pyongyang.

“The United States needs to send a high-level envoy to North Korea to bring these women home. The obvious candidate would be Gore,” wrote Cha, who is now a a professor at Georgetown University.

Al Gore would be a real asset to helping with this issue and would expand his scope as an activist.

as pointed out by Brooklynbadboy in the comments, this will probably be a ‘slam dunk’ or Obama would not send Gore.

My view is that Gore’s recent collaboration with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon who is the former South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs –

will add additional pressure on the North to comply with calls for the release of the journalists. It will be interesting to find out if this will be part of the dialogue on the North’s missile launches.

I believe this is one of many uses for the former PRESIDENT Al Gore and I hope this will be the start of a lot of trips and diplomatic missions for President Gore.

my video from the DNC 2008

(for a detailed history of US policies with N.Korea, visit Mel Goodman’s current diary.)